Trump's similarities to Putin are evident, but will we call him out for what he really is?

In 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson, a man named John A. Stormer self-published a book called None Dare Call It Treason.
It accused America’s left-leaning elites of paving the way for a Soviet
victory in the Cold War. The book sold 7 million copies, but Johnson
crushed Goldwater in the election.

Now that the CIA has determined
that the Russians intervened in the presidential election to help Trump
win, the Cold War politics of left and right have been flipped. If
Stormer rewrote his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:

Beware
of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s
bidding. Anyone who enables him — on his payroll or in the press, by
sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice — is Vladimir
Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like
normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy.

Trump
as traitor: I can just imagine the reaction from the Tower penthouse.
Lying media. Paranoid hyperbole. Partisan libel. Sour grapes. A pathetic
bid for clicks. A desperate assault on the will of the people. Sad!
(Note to the tweeter-in-chief: You’re welcome.)

As a kid in a New
Jersey household where Adlai Stevenson was worshipped, I thought Stormer
was a nut job, so I won’t pretend that accepting the modern inverse of
his case is a no-brainer. I’m also not trying to recast my political
differences with the president-elect as a national security crisis.
Trump won. Elections have consequences. I get that.

I may not like
it, but I’m not surprised that Trump tapped Oklahoma Attorney General
Scott Pruitt, a crusading climate change denier and an advocate of
dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, to run the EPA,
presumably into the ground. Anyone who interpreted Al Gore’s meeting
with Trump as a sign of his open-mindedness on climate change got
played, just like Gore got played.

Similarly, I’m cynical but not
shocked that Trump’s picks for treasury secretary, National Economic
Council and chief adviser – Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn and Steve Bannon –
are alumni of Goldman Sachs. A billionaire managed to hijack Bernie
Sanders’ indictment of Wall Street and brand Hillary Clinton as the
stooge of Goldman Sachs. The success of that impersonation isn’t on
Trump, it’s on us.

I’m infuriated, but not startled that Trump
refuses to disclose his tax returns, divest his assets, create a
credible blind trust, obey the constitutional prohibition of foreign
emoluments or eliminate the conflict between fattening his family
fortune and advancing American interests. That’s not draining the swamp,
it’s drinking it.

I
wrote this piece back in July of 2016, and circulated it to a few folks
for feedback before declining to publish it. It just seemed a bit too
crazypants and tinfoil-hatty, with all its talk of totalitarianism and
dystopia. In light of recent events, it suddenly seems a lot less
out-there.

Over
the course of my years-long engagement with smart people on all sides
of America’s gun debate — from coffee shops in San Francisco to private
suites off the floor of the gun industry’s annual Las Vegas trade
show — I’ve come to believe that there are really only two broader
ideological camps that people fall into when it comes to the right to
keep and bear arms.

No,
the two camps aren’t “blame the shooter” vs. “blame the gun” — that
whole discourse is a sad sideshow, and I think both sides are probably
tired of swatting each other with the same limp bromides (“the only
thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” vs.
“here’s what every entry in this catalog of otherwise unrelated horrors
has in common: guns!”).

Rather,
the real divide between the pro- and anti-gun camps is much deeper, and
is rooted in their sharply divergent readings of the history of human
relations. To use a ten-dollar word from my years as a humanities grad
student, what we have here is a clash of hermeneutics.

Not
only do both camps reason about the present and future on the basis of
different interpretations of a shared past, but the gun control argument
is so exhausting for everyone involved because it ultimately forces
each side into the uncomfortable position of arguing for the truth of
grand propositions that it actually hopes are false.

Despite
all of this, I do believe there’s a faint glimmer of hope for finding
common ground. But before we can discover what we have in common, we
have to understand where and how we truly differ.

The Moral Arc vs. the Vicious Cycle

Any
given gun control discussion may work its way through topics like
hunting and other hobbies, or delve into theoretical questions of
individual liberty and its limits, or cover the practical nuts-and-bolts
of who really needs what type of firearm for which hypothetical
use-of-force scenario, but all arguments over Americans and their
firearms ultimately end up in one place: a dispute about the usefulness
and legitimacy of the constitutional right of private citizens to keep
in their homes the tools of violence as a last bulwark against tyranny.

How
you view the Second Amendment — as an embarrassing relic of a barbarous
past, or as a last-ditch deterrent against the rise of domestic
tyranny — depends on the shape you see when you look at history: an arc
or a circle.

Folks in
the anti-gun camp tend to believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that,
“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
These are people who have faith in Progress and Perfectibility, and who
will warn you in all earnestness that there is a “right side of history”
and you had better get on it. These folks aren’t having any talk of a
hypothetical fascist dystopia in the US; to them, that’s paranoid
fantasy from a bygone era, and meanwhile there are real lives being lost
to gun violence right now.

The
other camp, which I confess to being a lifetime member of, sees history
as cyclical, with no real long-term trajectory. We take it as
self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun; human nature
doesn’t change; and humans keep re-learning the same painful lessons as
species. To those of us who are members of the “human relations go
‘round in a vicious, bloody circle” tribe, the concept of any sort of
long-term positive trend in the way we relate to one another is not only
lunatic, but actively dangerous.

In
this respect, despite the fact that I’m a Christian, I find myself
sympathizing with the atheists who look on in frustrated wonderment as
otherwise rational people bend the knee and send their petitions up to
an invisible man in the sky, as if that would solve a single pressing
problem faced by humanity.

Whenever
my liberal friends bring up the magical Moral Arc to buttress their
argument on some issue or other, I think to myself, “how could someone
so smart be so stupid? Are they really willing to put their trust in
this smug, secular eschatology? How
can they believe, on the basis of a few paltry decades of mostly mixed
evidence, that the great Moral Arc of the Universe will eventually, over
the very long term, ensure that their ‘right side of history’ wins out
in the end?”

Canada’s
prime minister tells the Guardian why, in a world where populism,
divisiveness and fear are on the rise, he’s taking the opposite approach

Ordinary people around the world have been failed by globalisation, Justin Trudeau
has told the Guardian, as he sought to explain a turbulent year marked
by the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote and the rise of
anti-establishment, nation-first parties around the world.

“What
we’re facing right now – in terms of the rise of populism and divisive
and fearful narratives around the world – it’s based around the fact
that globalisation doesn’t seem to be working for the middle class, for
ordinary people,” the Canadian prime minister said in an interview at
his oak-panelled office in the country’s parliament. “And this is
something that we identified years ago and built an entire platform and
agenda for governing on.”

But
as he enters his second year in power, Trudeau – a former high school
teacher and snowboarding instructor – is under pressure to show the
world that his government has found an alternative means of tackling the
concerns of those who feel they’ve been left behind.He cited the signing of Ceta – the free trade deal between the EU and Canada – and a hotly contested decision to approve two pipelines as examples of this approach.

“We
were able to sign free trade agreement with Europe at a time when
people tend to be closing off,” he said. “We’re actually able to approve
pipelines at a time when everyone wants protection of the environment.
We’re being able to show that we get people’s fears and there are
constructive ways of allaying them – and not just ways to lash out and
give a big kick to the system.”

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Many
people are reacting to the rise of Trumpism and nativist movements in
Europe by reading history — specifically, the history of the 1930s. And
they are right to do so. It takes willful blindness not to see the
parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political
nightmare.

But
the ’30s isn’t the only era with lessons to teach us. Lately I’ve been
reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was
doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse
with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary
resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the
Roman Republic fell.

Here’s
what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny
when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it
comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade.

On
the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among
ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by
some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In
the Name of Rome” says:
“However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his
and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the
good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid
of a foreign power.”

America used to be like that, with prominent senators declaring
that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” But now we
have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his
opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is
just fine with that. (A new poll
shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though
— or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian
intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning
domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the
republic be damned.

And
what happens to the republic as a result? Famously, on paper the
transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened.
Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened
to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,”
on everything that mattered. We may not go down exactly the same route —
although are we even sure of that? — but the process of destroying
democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.

The seismic events of 2016 have revealed a world in chaos – and one that old ideas of liberal rationalism can no longer explain

The
election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is the
biggest political earthquake of our times, and its reverberations are
inescapably global. It has fully revealed an enormous pent-up anger –
which had first become visible in the mass acclaim in Russia and Turkey for pitiless despots and the electoral triumph of bloody strongmen in India and the Philippines.

The
insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European
far right, have many local causes – but it is not an accident that
demagoguery appears to be rising around the world. Savage violence has
erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in
Ukraine and the Middle East, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand,
terrorism and counter-terrorism, economic and cyberwar.
The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic and
uncontrollable. Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has
gone mainstream; figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice
are ubiquitous on old and new media alike.

There is much dispute
about the causes of this global disorder. Many observers have
characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment,
explaining Trump’s victory – in the words of Thomas Piketty – as
“primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in
the United States”. Liberals tend to blame the racial resentments of
poor white Americans, which were apparently aggravated during Barack
Obama’s tenure. But many rich men and women – and even a small number of
African-Americans and Latinos – also voted for a compulsive groper and
white supremacist.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman
admitted on the night of Trump’s victory that “people like me – and
probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t
understand the country we live in”. Since the twin shocks of Brexit and the US election,
we have argued ineffectually about their causes, while watching aghast
as the new representatives of the downtrodden and the “left-behind” –
Trump and Nigel Farage, posing in a gold-plated lift – strut across a
bewilderingly expanded theatre of political absurdism.

But we
cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts
and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled
forces.

In the hopeful years that followed the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy
seemed assured; free markets and human rights would spread around the
world and lift billions from poverty and oppression. In many ways, this
dream has come true: we live in a vast, homogenous global market, which
is more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time
in history.

And yet we find ourselves in an age of anger, with
authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of
furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified
with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest
globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar,
as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes
have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox
by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit.
Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote:
“Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately
“explain the world we’re living in.”

The largely Anglo-American
intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant
aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn
to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for
thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive,
savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any
individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show
themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to
the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole
tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in
outbursts.”

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Malak
al-Shehri’s tweet defying Saudi dress code caused backlash, with many
people calling for her to be executed, but supporters comparing her to
Rosa Parks

Mazin SidahmedMonday 12 December 2016Saudi
police have arrested a young woman who tweeted a picture of herself
outdoors without the body-length robes and head scarf that women in the
kingdom are required to wear.

A woman identified as Malak
al-Shehri posted a picture of herself on Twitter in a jacket and
multi-colored dress last month after announcing that she would leave her
house without her abaya, a long loose-fitting robe, and headscarf.

The tweet caused a backlash
with many calling for Shehri – whose first name means angel, which was
also her moniker online – to be executed with the hashtag “We demand the
arrest of the rebel Angel Shehri.”

The picture posted on the
downtown Riyadh street of al-Tahliya, led to someone filing a complaint
with the religious police, and eventually to the woman’s arrest,
according to the local Arabic-language Al-Sharq newspaper.

A
police spokesman told the newspaper that Shehri, who is in her 20s, was
taken to prison and he also accused her of “speaking openly about
prohibited relations with (non-related) men”.

“Police officers
have detained a girl who had removed her abaya on al-Tahliya street,
implementing a challenge she announced on social media several days
ago,” the newspaper quoted Colonel Fawaz al-Maiman as saying.

Labor
and economic equality used to be at the heart of liberal politics. Rich
professionals expunged these concerns – and have reaped the
consequences

What
makes 2016 a disaster for Democrats is not merely the party’s epic
wipeout in Washington and the state capitals, but that the contest was
fought out on a terrain that should have been favorable to them. This
was an election about social class –about class-based grievances – and
yet the Party of the People blew it. How that happened is the question
of the year, just as it has been the question of other disastrous
election years before. And just like before, I suspect the Democrats will find all manner of convenient reasons to take no corrective action.

But
first let us focus on the good news. Donald Trump has smashed the
consensus factions of both parties. Along the way, he has destroyed the
core doctrine of Clintonism: that all elections are decided by money and
that therefore Democrats must match Republican fundraising dollar for
dollar. This is the doctrine on which progressive hopes have been
sacrificed for decades, and now it is dead. Clinton outspent Trump
two-to-one and it still wasn’t enough.

Neither were any of the
other patented maneuvers of Clintonism. With Hillary carrying their
banner, the Democrats triangulated themselves in every way imaginable.
They partied with the Wall Street guys during the convention in
Philadelphia, they got cozy with the national security set, they reached
out to disaffected Republicans, they reminisced about the days of the
balanced federal budget, they even encouraged Democratic
delegates to take Ubers back and forth from the convention to show how
strongly Democrats approved of what Silicon Valley was doing to America.
And still they lost.This is important because winning is
supposed to be the raison d’etre of centrism. Over the years, the
centrists have betrayed the Democratic party’s liberal base in all sorts
of ways – deregulating banks, securing free trade deals, signing off on
Wall Street bailouts and the Iraq war. Those who bridled at all this
were instructed to sit down and shut up because the Clintons and their
triangulating ilk were the practical ones who would bring us victory.

Except
that they don’t. This year the Republicans chose an honest-to-god scary
candidate, a man who really ought to have been kept out of the White
House, and the party’s centrists choked. Instead of winning, the
pragmatists delivered Democrats to the worst situation they’ve been in
for many decades, with control of no branch of the federal government
and only a handful of state legislatures. Over the years, and at the
behest of this faction, Democrats gave up what they stood for piece by
piece and what they have to show for it now is nothing.

Another
shibboleth that went down with the Hillary Titanic is the myth of the
moderate swing voter, the sensible suburbanite who stands somewhere
between the two parties and whose views determine all elections. These
swing voters are usually supposed to be liberal on social issues and
conservative on economic ones, and their existence gives a kind of pseudoscientific imprimatur to Democratic centrism.

For years people have pointed out
that this tidy geometry doesn’t really make sense, and today it is
undeniable: the real swing voters are the working people who over the
years have switched their loyalty from the Democrats to Trump’s
Republicans. Their views are pretty much the reverse of the standard
model. On certain matters they are open to conservative blandishments;
on economic issues, however, they are pretty far to the left. They don’t
admire free trade or balanced budgets or entitlement reform –
the signature issues of centrism – they hate those things. And if
Democrats want to reach them, they will have to turn away from the
so-called center and back to the economic left.There are some
indications that Democrats have finally understood this. Elizabeth
Warren’s star is on the rise. Bernie Sanders is touring the country and
reminding people that class politics are back whether we like it or not.
Keith Ellison is running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

But
the media and political establishments, I suspect, will have none of
it. They may hate Donald Trump, but they hate economic populism much
more. If history is a guide, they will embrace any sophistry to ensure
that the Democrats do not take the steps required to broaden their
appeal to working-class voters. They will remind everyone that Clinton
didn’t really lose. Alternately, they will blame Sanders for her loss.
They will decide that working-class people cannot be reasoned with and
so it is pointless to try. They will declare – are already declaring –
that any Democratic effort to win over working-class voters is a
capitulation to racism. Better to lose future elections than to compete
for the votes of those who spurned their beloved Clinton.

Donald Trump came and said he cared. It’s not rocket science: that’s why he won

I
come from rural Texas. I am one of the handful of people here who votes
blue – and I put up with all kinds of ridicule and rejection because of
that. Many of the people who voted for Trump are my friends and family.
Yes, some of them are racist but not all of them are. The reason they
support Trump is simple: their needs have been thrown aside for years.

Donald
Trump is a horrible person. I am glad people are protesting him. But
many people here do not see an alternative. The Democratic party does
not care about our issues, our culture or our people. There are hundreds
of towns in this country just like ours. Well, Donald Trump came and
said he cared. That’s why he won: it is not rocket science. We need to
look at the truth so we can bring about change.

People here are
losing everything that generations of families have worked to build.
They depend on their churches for help. They believe people should work
hard. Most of us work six to seven days a week, every week. It is no
good to judge us instead of understanding us.

We have two private
prisons in this town that sustain us in this crunch. Do I agree with
private prisons? No. At the same time, if our prisons close it will wipe
us out. Not one blue politician has offered a plan to deal with what
happens to us then.

It’s the same with climate change. My hometown
flourished for years because of oil. Now that the price of oil is down,
this town lives on one-third of the budget they had. Nobody in
Washington DC cares about that either. No wonder so many people in coal
country voted for Trump: they were worried about their jobs and income,
and they felt that he was the only one listening.

The people who
are writing us all off as racists and deplorables have not seen the
community and kindness that exists here. When our elementary school
burned down the year before last the whole community everyone dug deep
to find the money to buy and build a new school.

In my community, I
see a mother whose kid has been in the hospital for a month come home
and start her coat drive the next day. I see another mother who spends
the month of October collecting junk and selling it for money to send
care packages to the military overseas.

I see another woman build
one of the state’s best animal rescue centers. She makes sure that
everyone can afford to get their pet neutered. I see her spend every
Saturday driving 40 miles for dogs to find a home. I see the local
community board provide me with space to make a community garden that is
free so everyone in town will have access to organic food.

Rural
culture is as important as any other culture and is often thought of as
backwards, dumb and redneck. At university, people assumed I was stupid
because of my accent. A colleague said right in front of me that my
southern accent and enthusiasm should be overlooked because, actually, I
was smart. Now that Trump has won, I see countless people say that my
community – and communities like mine – voted him because we are
ignorant and bad-hearted. How is that going to help things?

I
completely understand why people voted for Trump. I do not agree with it
but I understand it. If people want things to change they need to
understand us too: we are hurting. We need help to turn our communities
around – otherwise, people like Trump will continue to get votes here.

A
few years ago, four friends began a conversation: Here we are in our
50s and 60s, still active and (relatively) youthful, but all moving
toward the day when we can no longer cling to our cherished
independence. Retirement homes seem unappealing, nursing homes a last
resort. Why not live together and support each other?

It
was casual at first, a bit of a joke. But we kept coming back to it.
Finally, a few months ago, we went off for a weekend together to come up
with a plan.

We began with our reasons for wanting to consider this seemingly offbeat idea. What attracts us to living together?

First,
community. André Picard, among others, has written about the extensive
research showing that community is vital to health. Being connected – to
family, friends, neighbours, a community group, a running club, a
mosque – can add years to your life, studies have found.

Second,
a smaller carbon footprint. A smaller home envelope to heat and cool
and a shared kitchen with fewer appliances than separate houses mean
fewer greenhouse gases.

While
affordability is not the key driver of our plan, we do expect living
together to be more economical than our current, independent living
arrangements.

Gradually, a rough plan
came into focus. The house should have a front porch, one of us said
(zeroing in on essentials!). It has to be downtown, we all agreed –
downtown, walkable and close to transit.

Over
the course of our weekend retreat, the conversation took some radical
turns. Initially, we had imagined a series of neighbouring condos or
other self-contained units, but as we talked further, we found ourselves
more drawn to a truly shared space.

We
realized, for example, that we want to eat dinner together more often
than not. Most of us like to cook, and we all love to eat. So a big
common kitchen is essential. We like to discuss stuff – just about any
stuff – so we need places for conversation.

We
have children and grandchildren, and love to entertain, so a guest
suite is an obvious need. A media room. A wine cellar! As the common
areas became more central to our discussion, the private areas became
smaller. We now imagine each unit (person or couple) having private
space of about 600 square feet, designed to suit individual preferences.
Naturally, everything will be designed to accommodate “aging in place.”

Saturday, November 19, 2016

It
is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a
beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly
those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths,
are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but
certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an
extraordinary success story.

But
how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal
answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware
of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of
moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics
in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped
into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that
has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a
unifying force capable of governing.

One
of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and
its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be
brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting
when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they
relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at
home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and
slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to
African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This
was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America,
you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will
notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what
happened with the white working class and those with strong religious
convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees
voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The
moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good
effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life.
Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a
conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our
popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public
life.

But
the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a
generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of
conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the
task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young
age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual
identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college
many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and
have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class,
war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of
high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the
identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted
picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country.
(The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real
and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first
understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of
government based on the guarantee of rights.)

When
Margo Thorning was a high school student in the late 1950s, she liked
to play bongo drums while listening to jazz records, but it never
occurred to her to take a drum lesson. She attended college, raised two
sons, and worked as a senior economic policy adviser for a Washington
think tank. All the while, the urge to beat out a rhythm persisted. So
three years ago, at age 70, she started taking lessons.

“I’m
pretty athletic, and I felt like I had a chance to be competent,” said
Thorning, a Falls Church resident who plays tennis and rides horses. But
drums were a challenge, physically and mentally. “Each hand and each
foot is doing something, with a different hand and a different foot at
one time.”Mastering a new musical instrument has a reputation as a
young person’s game. Like learning a foreign language, it is commonly
seen as something that must be embedded during the formative years,
otherwise the learner will be hopelessly behind, if not simply hopeless.

But
increasingly, adults are embracing musicianship late in life. Some
finally have time after their wage-earning and child-raising years have
ended. Some are spurred on by studies showing the health benefits of
playing music. Many describe it as scratching an itch they’ve had all
their lives. And while some are happy to get to the point of playing
“Happy Birthday” for their grandchildren, others achieve a level of
competence that allows them to join ensembles and even earn money
playing.

“It’s a growing trend,” said Alicia Andrews, assistant
director and adult division manager at the Lucy Moses School at Kaufman
Music Center in New York City. “In the last few years, more adults are
really making music and arts a priority in their lives. ‘Bucket list’ is
such a trendy term, but that’s what they say — ‘Playing an instrument
has been on my bucket list.’ ”

Gary Marcus, a professor of
psychology and neural science at New York University who wrote a book
about learning guitar at age 40, said the idea that older people can’t
learn new instruments is false. “There are very few really firm critical
periods,” he said. “In general, most things adults can learn, but it
takes more time, and they have to do it more incrementally. Maybe they
won’t play like Jimi Hendrix, but they will be able to play well enough
to satisfy themselves.”

Research shows that music stimulates the
brain and enhances memory in older people. In one study, adults aged 60
to 85 without previous musical experience showed improved verbal fluency
and processing speed after a few months of weekly piano lessons.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

You
don’t end up in Round Valley, one of Mendocino County’s finest
cannabis-growing micro climates, by accident. It is well northeast of
Highway 101, along a winding mountain road that follows the curves of
Outlet Creek and the Middle Fork of the Eel River.

After 45
minutes, the valley comes into view. From a lookout called Inspiration
Point, even in a light drizzle, Round Valley is a picture of bucolic
grace, with wheat-colored fields, black cows and green orchards
spreading out below.

Many of those groves conceal marijuana plants
— or trees as they call them around here — which flourish in the rich
alluvial soil of the valley’s fertile bottomland.

The highway
through the valley is dead straight, punctuated by one town, Covelo,
population about 1,200. Just past town, I pulled onto a farm owned by
Robert and John Cunnan, identical 76-year-old twins who were born in
Glendale and left Southern California more than 40 years ago seeking a
better life.

“We came here with the back-to-the-land movement,”
Robert told me as we stood in front of a shed where dozens of fragrant
cannabis stalks were hanging to dry.

For $6,500, the brothers
bought 10 acres with a creek down the middle. They built craftsman-style
homes for themselves and raised families on food they grew in their
gardens and money earned as cabinet makers for what they call
“mom-and-pop” businesses — restaurants, coffee shops and boutiques. They
got by, but barely.

“A friend of mine came up here in 1985, grew
marijuana and sold it for $2,000 a pound,” Robert said. “And that’s when
I thought, ‘You know, you might be able to make a little money doing
this.’ ”

This, pretty much, is the very thought that has crossed
the minds of untold thousands of Mendocino County residents, beleaguered
by the crashing logging and fishing industries, and willing to flout
the law to support their families.

“At one time, I sold stuff for
$5,000 a pound,” Robert said. “It was worth more than gold. Now, it’s
down to $1,200 to $1,500. But cannabis allowed me to finish my house and
get comfortable.” (Yields vary wildly, but in these parts, each tree
can produce two to four pounds or more.)

“I consider myself a
teacher and a woodworker,” said John, who commutes to Ukiah once a week
to teach woodworking in two schools. “The cannabis is just to fill in
where the teaching and woodworking don’t pay the bills.”

I assumed
the Cunnans would be strong proponents of legalizing cannabis for
recreational use. As it turns out, they oppose Proposition 64, which
would regulate and tax cannabis for the adult market.And they are not alone.

Many small marijuana farmers, as it happens, see Proposition 64 as a threat to their way of life.They
believe that a legal, regulated cannabis market could open the
floodgates to corporatization of the industry, pushing taxes up and
prices down, perhaps forcing them out of business altogether.“The
thing you need to realize is that this is a movement that is becoming
an industry,” Robert said. “The movement was organic gardening, the
back-to-the-land, alternative lifestyle. We were the original generation
that came out here and set up our pot gardens.”

Like mom-and-pop
businesses squeezed out by big-box retailers, he said, so are pot
farmers in danger of being squeezed out of business once big
corporations get a toehold in the cannabis business.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

The outdoor gear store wants its employees and customers to go outside

Alexander C. Kaufman10/24/2016
For the second year in a row, REI is telling its customers to take a hike.

The
sporting goods retailer said Monday it plans to close all 149 stores on
Black Friday, the annual shopping bonanza that has in recent years
sprawled over into Thanksgiving itself. The company’s website won’t
process any sales on Black Friday, and all 12,287 employees will be paid
to take the day off.

Instead, REI ― whose name stands for
Recreational Equipment, Inc. ― is once again urging would-be shoppers to
spend the holiday outside.

“Consumerism has had a push for a long
period of time,” Jerry Stritzke, REI’s chief executive, told The
Huffington Post on Monday. “The response we saw last year to our
announcement is really a backlash to the consumerism invading our key
holidays.”

A growing number of retail workers can no longer count on being able to take Thanksgiving off. This year, 49 percent of retailers plan to stay open on the holiday, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers ― up 1 percent from the year before.

The
Seattle-based REI is bucking that trend, enlisting nearly 275
organizations ― including the National Park Service and a handful of
nonprofits that take kids from poor, inner-city homes out into nature ―
to host events supporting its marketing campaign, known as #OptOutside.

Last year, REI saw a 100 percent increase in job applications in the 30 days after stores closed on Black Friday, Stritzke said.

“That’s a pretty tangible way of telling us that the idea was very well received,” he said.
REI
plans to become more politically active, making conservation and
environmental advocacy a bigger part of its ethos, Stritzke said. Beyond
climate change, he’d like to see more discussion of the value of
exposing children to the outdoors and “the power of nature to heal.”

On
November 9, 1938, the Nazi paramilitary force known as the SA led a
pogrom against German Jews that is now known as Kristallnacht, or the
Night of the Broken Glass. They torched synagogues, smashed Jewish
businesses and ransacked Jewish homes, sending an estimated 30,000 of
their occupants to concentration camps. The two-day orgy of anti-Semitic
violence was a decisive turning point in the Nazi war against the Jews,
which morphed into genocide.

This year, one night before we
commemorate that event, millions of Americans will cast their ballot for
Donald Trump, whose candidacy for President of the United States is
supported by neo-Nazis. There is a cynical aphorism about history — that
its most consistent lesson teaches that humans consistently fail to
learn from history. Seven decades after thousands of American soldiers
died fighting Hitler’s army in Europe, the current election campaign
illustrates this frightening truth.

For Jews in America, this
election has revealed an additional truth that has not really been
sufficiently acknowledged — perhaps because it is too sickening and
frightening to think about. And that is that for the American media,
which caters to the American people, it was the “Access Hollywood” video
showcasing Trump’s misogyny that caused the biggest wave of outrage —
and not his flirtations with fascism. Americans’ reaction to the video
proved that they find insults to beautiful white women unforgivable;
neo-Nazi affiliations are, on the other hand, discomfiting, but
ultimately tolerable.

And yet, just as a minority of Italian Jews
once joined Mussolini’s fascist party, there are Trump-supporting Jews
who choose to overlook, minimize or dismiss the GOP candidate’s neo-Nazi
affiliations. Jewish voters are overwhelmingly aligned with the
Democratic Party, but about 19% of them support Trump — including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has given millions to the Trump campaign.

For
months, Trump played a delicate game of downplaying his neo-Nazi
support by burnishing his Jew-loving credentials. He spoke at the annual
American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference to a standing
ovation. On other occasions he promised Jewish audiences he’d be the
greatest supporter of Israel we’d ever seen. His daughter Ivanka, a
convert to Judaism, has become the elegant face of her father’s
campaign; and her husband Jared Kushner, a powerful New York businessman
from an Orthodox family, is a senior adviser to his father-in-law’s
campaign. Trump often trots out his Jewish daughter as evidence that he
could not possibly be an anti-Semite; and while one Orthodox Jewish
blogger slays that argument rather succinctly,
so far the GOP candidate has managed to convince even many of his
opponents that, while he is not a sympathetic figure, he is no Jew
hater.

Despite the mountain of evidence
that he is a real, old-fashioned, strutting and sieg-heiling type of
Jew hater, Trump has for the most part managed to avoid being labeled an
anti-Semite.

Even the Anti-Defamation League, which just issued a report
documenting a sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish journalists
during the presidential campaign, has pulled its punches. Responding to
Trump’s last campaign ad, which mainstream American media labeled an
overt rip-off of classic anti-Semitic tropes, Jonathan Greenblatt, the
CEO of the ADL, said, “Whether intentional or not, the images and rhetoric in this ad touch on subjects that anti-Semites have used for ages.”

While Clinton holds her head high, why are we not exploding with anger at Donald Trump’s bullying?

When
I was a girl of 11 I had an argument with my father that left my psyche
maimed. It was about whether a woman could be the president of the US.

How did it even start? I was no feminist
prodigy, just a shy kid who preferred reading to talking; politics
weren’t my destiny. Probably, I was trying to work out what was possible
for my category of person – legally, logistically – as one might ask
which kinds of terrain are navigable for a newly purchased bicycle. Up
until then, gender hadn’t darkened my mental doorway as I followed my
older brother into our daily adventures wearing hand-me-down jeans.

But
in adolescence it dawned on me I’d be spending my future as a woman,
and when I looked around, alarm bells rang. My mother was a capable,
intelligent, deeply unhappy woman who aspired to fulfilment as a
housewife but clearly disliked the job. I saw most of my friends’
mothers packed into that same dreary boat. My father was a country
physician, admired and rewarded for work he loved. In my primordial
search for a life coach, he was the natural choice.

I probably
started by asking him if girls could go to college, have jobs, be
doctors, tentatively working my way up the ladder. His answers grew more
equivocal until finally we faced off, Dad saying, “No” and me saying,
“But why not?” A female president would be dangerous. His reasons
vaguely referenced menstruation and emotional instability, innate female
attraction to maternity and aversion to power, and a general implied
ickyness that was beneath polite conversation.

I ended that
evening curled in bed with my fingernails digging into my palms and a
silent howl tearing through me that lasted hours and left me numb. The
next day I saw life at a remove, as if my skull had been jarred. What
changed for me was not a dashing of specific hopes, but an understanding
of what my father – the person whose respect I craved – really saw when
he looked at me. I was tainted. I would grow up to be a lesser person,
confined to an obliquely shameful life.

But I didn’t stop asking
what a woman gets to do, and so began a lifelong confrontation with that
internal howl. The slap-downs were often unexpected. Play drums in the
band? No. Sign up for the science team? Go camping with the guys? Go
jogging in shorts and a tank top without fear of being assaulted?
Experiment boldly, have a career, command a moral authority of my own?
Walk home safely after dark? No, no, no.

Eventually, I wrestled my
way to yes on most of these things, except of course the last one. And
the same dread that stalks me in dark parking lots – the helpless fury
of knowing I don’t get to be just a person here, going about my business
– has haunted all the other pursuits, from science team to career. It’s
a matter of getting up each day and pushing myself again into a place
some people think I have no right to occupy.

My father is very old
now. Lately, I brought up our ancient argument about who may occupy the
White House, but he didn’t remember it. The world has changed and so
has he, urged forward by working daughters and granddaughters. He’s
ready and eager to vote for a woman president. But it’s knocked the
breath out of me to learn that most of his peers are not.

Hillary Clinton
has honoured the rules of civic duty and met the prerequisites for a
candidate, bringing a lifetime of pertinent experience, an inquiring
mind, a record of compassionate service and a sound grasp of our
nation’s every challenge, from international relations to climate
change; her stated desire is to work hard for our country and its
future.

There is a growing trend toward 'New Consumerism', which means that people are buying more conscientiously than ever before.

Skinny
jeans became popular ten years ago. I’ll never forget the horror I
felt, arriving back in Canada after a year in Brazil, to find people
walking the streets of Toronto in pants that looked like something my
(seriously untrendy) mother would wear. I told a friend, “You’ll never
catch me dead in those.” A decade later, she still teases me about that
comment, as skinny jeans have obviously become a wardrobe staple.

Since then, nothing terribly big or exciting has happened in the fashion world, according to retailer Urban Outfitters:

“Real
changes in fashion which spur the public into spending money on a whole
new look are few and far between. In mainstream terms, the last really
big trend was skinny jeans… And we’re still wearing them” (The Independent).

It
appears that people are less interested in buying clothes than they
once were. While they’re spending more money than ever, those dollars
are being directed elsewhere, typically more toward food and away from
fashion, where retailers are reporting decreases in profit. Seasonal
trends are increasingly removed from reality, as people don’t want to
spend their money on updates that appear insignificant. The Independent reports:

“There
is a world of difference between the ‘seasons’ that fashion editors
talk about, with different styles offered up to four times a year, and
the real world, where people put on layers and just don’t see the need
for a new coat every October.”

Today’s consumers are reassessing their priorities and questioning what they really value. This fits into the growing trend of ‘New Consumerism,’
a term coined by research firm Euromonitor International to describe a
widespread movement that prioritizes conscientious shopping over
conspicuous consumerism. There are eight key trends that comprise New
Consumerism:

1) The circular economy (where everything is use and nothing is wasted)2) Frugal innovation (eliminating costly, unnecessary features from inventions)3) Trading up and trading down (willingness to compromise in some areas to be able to splurge in others)4) The sharing economy (connecting supply and demand, disrupting the traditional way of conducting business)5) Experiential purchases over material ones6) Buying time for oneself (an increase in outsourced tasks)7) Reassessing one’s use of space (i.e. Do I really need to live in a large home?)8) The ‘gig’ economy (characterized by short-term work contracts and freelancing, as well as the ability to move around)

In the fashion world, writes Business of Fashion,
New Consumerism has translated into demand for increased transparency,
authentic brand values, sustainable production processes, an embrace of
the sharing economy, and unique retail experiences, among other things.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson